The use of the Internet has grown substantially over the last decade, and an important use of the Internet is electronic commerce, or e-commerce for short. One way in which e-commerce is conducted is through the provision of websites with web pages that contain information about products and services being offered for sale by a merchant. Such websites often provide for contact with a human being. For example, some websites allow a customer who may be reluctant to provide a credit card number online the option to purchase products and services via a PSTN (public switched telephone network) phone call to the merchant. Also, whether or not a web page offers the opportunity to make purchases, users of web pages often find themselves in situations in which human assistance is desirable. For example, a user may not be able to locate a desired product or service on a website, or may need information about such a product or service that is not available on the website even if the user has located a product or service on the website. A user may also encounter difficulty in navigating the website or in performing some action such as completing an on-line purchase. There are numerous other reasons why a user of a website may require human assistance.
There are many ways in which human assistance may be rendered to a web page user. These include establishing a chat connection with the user, establishing a VOIP call with the user, providing a “callback” to the user (which can be a PSTN callback or a VOIP callback, and can be immediate or at a time requested by the user), and simply providing a number which the user can dial to talk to a merchant call center.
When a user contacts a call center, it is desirable for the call center to have as much information about the user as possible. For example, when a known user calls a call center, the user's ANI (automatic number identification) or CallerID may be used to provide a “screen pop” of information about the known user on the computer display of the agent to whom the call is directed. This of course requires the call center to have a record of the user's phone number, and further requires the user to be calling from the particular phone line associated with that number. The ability to do a screen pop in the context of a call back is also desirable, and methods for accomplishing this are discussed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/863,175, entitled “Method and Apparatus for Cross Channel Data Processing,” the contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference herein.
It is also often desirable for an agent at a call center to be able to view a web page being viewed by a user when the need or desire for the human contact arose. Even more advantageous is the ability for a call center agent to be able to “push” web pages to the user's computer. This ability is sometimes referred to in the art as “co-browsing.” The aforementioned application as well as U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/737,729, entitled “Method and Apparatus for JavaScript Co-Browsing,” the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference herein, disclose systems and methods for enabling co-browsing in the context of a callback.
The methods for providing context data (including data identifying the user, the user's computer and/or the web page being viewed by the user) discussed above do not work in all scenarios. For example, when a new user simply calls a telephone number associated with the website, or when an existing customer who has not logged on to a website calls from a telephone whose ANI/CallerID is not known to the call center or is blocked, there is no way for the call center to retrieve any context data for display to the agent.